The idea began with Sue Post, one of the owners of the Homer Bookstore and a foundation board member.

“For years people have come in (to the bookstore) and said, ‘isn’t there a book or do you have a book on Homer with pictures?’ We’d show them pictures in other coffee table books, but not one on just this area,” Post said. “I knew someone would do one at some point, but why not keep it as local as we can?”

Post presented her idea to Joy Steward, executive director of The Homer Foundation, got a positive response and in little more than a year the idea has become a reality.

“We put out a request for local photographers last October and got probably close to 200 photos,” Steward said of the response that was eventually pared down to 120 photos and from there trimmed by the project’s graphic designer, Barbara Jo Auburn, to 68 full-color photos from 21 contributors.

Providing the photographs were Dennis C. Anderson, Michael Armstrong, Daisy Lee Bitter, Claudia Ehli, Scott Dickerson, the Homer News, Millie Jeakins, Ron Keffer, Janet R. Klein, Nancy Levinson, C. Neil McArthur, Lee Post, Sue Post, Bob and Debbie Reyolds, Will Rice, Linda Smogor, Carla Stanley, Traveler Taj Terpening, John Tobin, DeWaine Tolefsrud and Wild North Photoraphy.

To that, several black and white historic photos have been added, thanks to the Pratt Museum and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“We had a really ambitious timeline and thought we’d have the book out last summer, so our photographers had about a month to respond, which is not very much time,” Steward said.

Then the idea to add text surfaced and Ann Keffer, a local writer and member of the foundation’s board, took on the task of contacting writers.

“We ended up with some topnotch writers and then, of course, someone had to go through and copy edit the text,” Keffer said, adding that the contributing writers — Daisy Lee Bitter, Tom Bodett, Sharon Bushel, Janet Klein, Tom Kizzia, Nancy Lord and Eva Saulitis — made her work easy.

“They’re all self-editors so there was very little to do. But of course, as with any publishing process, you find that there is proofreading to be done, editing for consistency and making decisions about what to leave and what to cut. That process has a way of letting some errors creep into the process, which you then have to find.”

Post’s vision, as well as that of the foundation, was to keep the project local. Sandra Higgins and Kevin Fraley at Print Works took over where Auburn left off.

“The glitch was that no one in the state of Alaska does bindery work,” Steward said. “The choices were to go overseas to Korea where most books are bound these days or find a printer in the United States, so Kevin (Fraley) hunted up a good publishing company for us.”

Not only did Fraley find Worzalla, a publishing company in Wisconsin, but he also traveled to the company to review the press run as the book came off the press.

“The vision always evolves as the project goes on, but it’s better than any vision I had,” Keffer said of the finished product.

Post agreed.

“I’m very pleased with how it came out. There are so many good photographs and the people that wrote for it are wonderful,” Post said. “It couldn’t have come out better in my eyes.”

Having missed the original target date of summer 2005, Steward hoped to have the book available this weekend.

“But that is just not going to happen,” she said.

As soon as “Kachemak Bay, Alaska” arrives on Monday, she will distribute copies to local outlets. It also will be available at the Nutcracker Faire on Dec. 3 and 4.